Jamming With Junior

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The kiddie festival is being promoted by partners like XM radio, which has a preschool music station, and Noggin, the commercial-free preschool spin-off of Nickelodeon that launched a music-video show last fall featuring Berkner, Milkshake and other Jamarama artists. (The bands say album sales have skyrocketed with the exposure.) "There's a national marketing and business engine behind adult music, but preschool music is more fractured," says Noggin's Angela Leaney. "The Sippy Cups are big in San Francisco. In Chicago it's Ralph's World. Someone needed to pull together a national business plan, take a deep breath and jump."

DuFine and Codikow haven't exhaled just yet, but they expect Jamarama to be an ongoing event and start making money next year. For now, it has no real competition in the baby's-first-festival market. A Kidzapalooza section made its debut at Lollapalooza last summer, but the latter is now held in only one city each year.

Still, Rob Light, head of music and a managing partner at Creative Artists Agency, has no doubt that other producers will try to emulate Jamarama. "When I was a kid, my parents would say, 'Run outside and play with your friends. I'll see you in four or five hours,'" he says. "That doesn't happen anymore in America. We've become a society that has to create environments in which kids can play." They certainly play hard at Jamarama, running from one sponsor-branded activity to another in the lobby and dancing in the aisles. "By the time you turn on the engine in the car, they've passed out," says DuFine. For many parents, that alone is worth the price of admission.